


fall into place

by gdgdbaby



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Inception, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-24
Updated: 2015-04-24
Packaged: 2018-03-25 11:44:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3809137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gdgdbaby/pseuds/gdgdbaby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"PK," PK said. He stretched out a warm hand, smiling broadly.</p><p>"That stand for anything?" Carey grunted, in lieu of the embarrassing <em>you shot me, motherfucker</em> and the even more embarrassing <em>mauve pinstripes clash terribly with your complexion</em>.</p><p>"I'll give you a million bucks in cold hard cash if you can guess," PK said, easy and confident, and they were off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fall into place

**Author's Note:**

> pk forges, carey builds. content warnings for some violence inherent to the AU.
> 
> ty once more to monica and a for looking at early drafts of this and letting me yell at them! :*

"Peace Keeper?" Carey says in Sydney, sleeves rolled up, the back of his dress shirt so soaked that it sticks to him like a second skin. A bead of sweat trickles down his nose and plops onto the blueprints stretched across the table. He wipes his forehead, corner of his mouth dipping. This heat is sickening. He really needs to talk to Therrien about getting the warehouse some AC. A fan, at the very least.

He looks up to find PK laughing so hard it's noiseless. Just the wide stretch of his mouth, eyes squeezed shut. "Seriously, Pricey," he wheezes, after, mopping at his face with a bright red pocket square. "Who would name their kid that?"

 

 

They'd met in Moscow. Or—rather, Carey met a version of him two levels deep in the head of a key Russian diplomat. PK was playing in-house security with Tavares, and Carey was working the job with Prust and Patches. None of them paid much attention to the brunette bombshell wandering around the dim floor of the wine bar. Carey had written her off as a projection. Bad choice. Two steps away, she'd shifted into a grinning man in a turquoise suit who shot Carey in the chest right before Patches got to the safe.

So planting the idea didn't take, for obvious reasons, but Prusty managed to hold off opposition of the oil bill their employer wanted passed in some other way. A way that involved a black eye and a missing tooth by the time they'd met again at the extraction point three days later. Carey hadn't asked. Had been otherwise preoccupied. For the next month, he woke up every morning with a phantom pain in his chest, and had to reach out and press a thumb against a spike on his silver rowel, almost hard enough to draw blood. Counted nine points in his head as he turned it over. Not a dream.

The second time, Therrien hired them both for a job in Mumbai. "PK," PK said. He stretched out a warm hand, smiling broadly.

"That stand for anything?" Carey grunted, in lieu of the embarrassing _you shot me, motherfucker_ and the even more embarrassing _mauve pinstripes clash terribly with your complexion_.

"I'll give you a million bucks in cold hard cash if you can guess," PK said, easy and confident, and they were off.

 

 

PK talks far too much for someone involved in subconscious espionage. Still, four years and six continents later, Carey hasn't managed to figure out his real name. At this point, it probably doesn't matter, but they get into it, sometimes, when the wind blows PK into town and Carey doesn't have anything better to do during their longer stretches of reconnaissance. "Player Kill," Carey guessed once, wry, on a subway bench in Tokyo, watching the trains whizz by.

"That would've been fucking sick," PK sighed, folding his arms behind his head. "I should text that to my dad."

 

 

In Sydney, the mark is a high-profile businessman looking to expand his property holdings into aboriginal territory. On their third day in the city, PK arranges a field trip to Chara Engineering, Ltd. "You can tag along as my muscle," PK says, face creasing.

"I'm not sure you need that," Carey returns, eyeing the circumference of PK's arms. The alternative, though, is watching Pleky's Somnacin experiments bubble all afternoon, so there's really no contest.

Truthfully, Carey likes watching PK work. Dreamshare is an insular industry. Difficult to penetrate, even harder to escape. After a year or two working the circuit, you got to know most of the main players, if not by nickname then by reputation. And if you didn't—well. That just meant you weren't playing in the big leagues yet. PK dresses like he's colorblind and makes obnoxious cash register noises every time Carey introduces himself as Price, but he still happens to be the best forger in the business. He knows how to read people in a way no one else does, can find clues in the tiniest of details. Unravel anyone's motivations from one meaningful glance. "There's at least one thing about every person you meet that you can fall in love with," PK explained in Prague, the first time Carey entered one of his dreams and watched as he built a disguise from scratch. "Sometimes it's love of family. Sometimes it's their past. If you can figure out what makes a person tick, what they care about, then you can tuck yourself into their consciousness like it's nothing."

There was a ripple in the dreamscape. Carey blinked once and PK was gone, replaced by a voluptuous woman of European descent, red curls cascading down her back.

"What do you think?" PK asked, voice still his.

Carey stepped closer, eyes narrow. The skin was too flawless, like something out of a glossy magazine spread. No pores. Carey said so, and PK clicked his throat. The skin sharpened, defined, and a tiny white scar appeared beneath the new laugh lines at the corner of his left eye. "Perfect," Carey said, and PK grinned.

 

 

The Chara job is pretty straightforward. All Carey has to do is design a one-level labyrinth complicated enough to keep Chara and PK-as-his-secretary out of his office while Gally extracts all of his expansion plans. He's used to most of PK's more obnoxious tendencies by now, but the unnecessary dancing and the smacking kiss on Carey's cheek after a job well done still earn him a half-hearted backhand to the head while Pleky's packing up their equipment. They're on a two-leg flight back to London by evening. PK spends the whole ride to Singapore aiming pretzels at the back of Pleky's head.

Most nights, Carey can't sleep without artificial assistance anymore, but it's easy to doze off next to PK, even when he's jostling both their seats in first class trying to play the dumb in-flight video games. Carey studiously doesn't examine why that might be so, or why he feels so well-rested when they land. "I'm staying for a week," PK says at the baggage claim in Changi Airport, waggling his fingers. Even his suitcase is an eye-searing orange. "The beaches are incredible this time of year. You should stay."

Carey's already got a job lined up in Bristol. A minor duke with too much time and money on his hands suspects his beautiful wife of infidelity. "Next time," he promises, and is faintly surprised to find that he might actually mean it.

 

 

He does some freelance corporate sabotage with Tazer on point and Sid as extractor that doesn't involve forgery at all, and then he takes a vacation. Valentine's Day comes and goes. Carey sends flowers to his mom and his sister, an apology for missing Christmas and an advance apology for probably missing Mother's Day as well. The next time Carey sees him, PK's trampling through the thick underbrush in an immaculate magenta three-piece suit, ruining all the prints Carey had carefully followed to get here. At the foot of Carey's tree, PK jams a hand across his forehead to shield against the sun and looks up.

"I like your outfit," he says.

Carey's dressed in worn jeans and a soft, plaid shirt. He'd forgone the usual hat. PK sounds sincere, but who really knows, with him?

”Therrien told me to come find you," he continues, as if that explains everything.

"You're going to scare the buck away," Carey points out. PK pays him no heed and starts climbing. Endless visions of PK falling out of the tree unfold before him in horrifying detail. There's a distant sound of rumbling, birds winding through the canopy in a flurry of motion, and then PK's hoisting himself onto the branch, legs dangling comfortably over the ten meter drop. The suit's somehow still immaculate.

Carey leans back against the trunk and tries to focus. Keep still. Breathe in, breathe out. "So this is what you do, huh," PK says, after a minute of companionable silence, during which an iPad and a set of blue and white Beats by Dre have materialized in his hands. "Dream of deer."

Carey shrugs, eyes glued to the path. "People in our position generally don't have the luxury of going home as often as they'd like. I make do."

"Oh," PK says. He stops fidgeting. When Carey glances at him again, his eyebrows are raised. "This is _home_?"

The first thing Carey did, when the army allowed him to conduct an initial solo run with the PASIV, was recreate the entire thirty-five acre lot of the ranch in Anahim Lake. Sometimes, Kayla's there, feeding the horses in the morning. Sometimes he goes riding with his grandma, but most of the time he's alone. Four feet tall again, skating across the creek in winter, or in a tree, arrow strung taut, waiting.

PK's playing Candy Crush. Carey's teeth grind for a moment, and then he folds his bow beneath his arm and lets his legs dangle, too.

"Why did Therrien send you?"

"He was concerned." His hands slide— _SWEET!_ the screen announces. "There have been a couple of accidents. With people in our position. Nothing major, but enough that it's a pattern. We can talk about it more," he makes a vague upward motion with his hand, "when we aren't in your head."

"Peter Kyle," Carey says, trying to catch him off guard.

PK makes a face. "Boring. You can do better than that."

"Paul Kristofferson?"

PK laughs. "Not even close."

Carey wakes up in a hotel room in Amsterdam and pulls the needle out of his arm. PK rouses in slow increments, collar rumpled, a line of drool oozing out of his open mouth. "Wasn't sure if you were just a projection," Carey croaks, tongue dry and ashy from sleep.

"Cash Money Price," PK says, sounding touched. "Do I appear in a lot of your dreams?" he asks, and laughs again when he sees the look on Carey's face.

 

 

Someone's intercepting jobs to trap dreamers in limbo. Tampering with the sedatives or something. At first, none of it had seemed insidious. They looked like accidents. Maybe someone got caught a couple of years down there, a decade. Not so long that coming back up to the surface would be like coming back to a different life. But some kid named Chucky's in a coma after a job gone wrong in Eastern Europe, PK says, and everyone would do well to err on the side of caution. Therrien liked to protect his assets.

Carey files this information away and flies to Dallas, which turns out to be a shit-show from beginning to end. The weather's shitty, the recon's shitty, the mark is shitty, and Larry's level of the dream collapses too soon for them to extract anything. Carey has to manually drop himself into limbo to slit a fifty-year-old Prusty's throat.

They split up after Prust's lucid enough to acknowledge the dream. Carey checks into a shitty motel off I-35 and shoots himself full of Somnacin.

This time, when PK finds him, Carey's in the Bell Center. What he can remember of it, at least, from being there twice and watching games on his phone. He kneels at the center of the empty stadium, pads soft beneath his legs, and lets his mind go blank. It's quiet, except for the clack of PK's shoes on the ice. "What are you doing?" he asks, and Carey's glove clenches around his stick.

"Meditating."

"In a goalie uniform?"

Carey makes a noise of confirmation. He feels himself being pulled sideways, and when he opens his eyes again, the stands are full. The crowd is roaring. The Habs are playing the Bruins, and Carey feels himself drop into a perfect butterfly as number 76 fends off an insistent forward two feet out from the left post.

"Nice technique," PK yells, and throws up a smooth arc of ice to chase after the puck.

PK's a good d-man. They win the first period 2-0, and Carey skates over to their bench, lifting his mask off his head to shake the sweat out of his hair. "Nice goal," he says, jostling PK in the locker room, and doesn't even mind when PK starts doing his victory dance.

 

 

He's coming off 30 hours of revolving travel when he gets the call in Montreal. "Check your email," Pleky says. Pleky never calls. His voice is scratchy and warped through the secure line, but Carey can also hear trouble. He locks himself in one of the airport bathrooms and puts Pleky on speaker.

"What am I looking at?"

"You saved my life in Zimbabwe, so I'm telling you this, now. There's a hit on PK."

Carey exhales, shortly, and navigates to his inbox. "What? How do you know?"

Pleky makes an impatient noise. "Contact of a contact. You know those freak accidents that have been happening? Turns out Chara wasn't too happy that we messed up his little operation in Australia. He's been looking for us all year. They tried to get the name of our employer out of me, so I fucked one of them up pretty good." A pause. "Well, I had Prusty do it. He's good for some things. He seemed pretty pissed off, too."

"You talk more when you're mad," Carey notes, which shuts him up. He finally finds the email. Taps the SUBBAN.pdf attachment, leg jiggling as he waits. It takes forever for the file to load. The text comes up first, in a slow wipe down: Pernell Karl Subban, twenty-six, from Toronto, Canada, grew up with four siblings. Recruited into corporate espionage straight out of an internship with Ernst and Young, of all things, where HR thought his skill set would be better suited elsewhere. Then the picture—and even here, grainy and cropped on the tiny screen of his phone, Carey can recognize the full mouth, the round face, the fuzz of stubble along his jaw. PK, Carey thinks, and the bottom of his stomach drops out.

"Why are you telling me this?" he hears himself ask. "Really? And don't give me the bullshit about Zimbabwe, because—"

Pleky makes a noise of surprise. "I don't have his number," he says slowly. "And this is PK we're talking about. You know him better than anyone."

 

 

Having a wide circle of criminal associates and being very loud must catch up with you at some point. This knowledge doesn't make swallowing the pill any easier. Carey paces in the bathroom until airport security bangs the door down and threatens to kick him out, after which he books a redeye flight to Johannesburg. Last he heard, PK was romping across South Africa. Not that he's been keeping tabs, or anything.

Frustratingly, Carey doesn't have PK's number either. He had never thought to ask—PK just always seems to find him.

Carey's first half year after moving into the private sector had involved being point man, until he and everyone else realized he was much better at building than research. A steadier hand built steadier dreams. Still, Carey remembers some of the old tricks, and PK lives like a man who has nothing to hide. Pernell Karl Subban yields a lot, including an interesting looking Twitter account that Carey will have to peruse in more detail when he isn't trying to save PK's life.

To his credit, PK is faster than most people believe. Housekeeping has already gone through his suite at the InterContinental, but Carey can still smell the faint notes of his aftershave, and the sour odor of hired muscle. "Mr. Subban checked out hours ago," the concierge says. "He said there would be people looking for him, and to tell them _haha, suckers, too late_ and _see you in Paris_ , in that order."

Of course PK would taunt anyone on his tail. "Idiot," Carey mutters, and buys a ticket to Charles de Gaulle.

 

 

The Marriott is a closer shave. Carey gets to the hotel right as Chara's men do. One of them escapes down the hall and through the doors of an elevator. The taller one loiters for a bit to shoot at Carey, bullet singing over his hair, and it takes Carey a minute to remember this isn't a dream, this is for fucking real, and duck out of the way.

 

 

PK goes to Vancouver, which is good for two reasons: 1) Carey's run out of pages in his passport for customs stamps, and 2) Carey has a lockbox in the area. By the time he's gone down for it and come back up to the Fairmont, the goons have caught up. Carey can hear PK's voice streaming through the cracked door of his suite, and goes very still. They haven't shot him yet, which is a good sign.

"Why don't you give your employer a call and see what he has to say about all this?" PK's saying.

"Don't listen to him," the taller one growls. "We're here to do one job, and that's—"

PK tuts. "Ah, but you know those sedatives go bad seventy-two hours after synthesis. And—" Carey peers in. PK's checking his watch, a sharp smile on his face. "It's definitely been longer than that, and I doubt you have access to any extra."

There's a moment of silence. The shorter hitman makes the call. Carey watches the muscles in his back bunch as he listens to the voice on the other end of the line, and thinks he's waited quite long enough. He pushes into the room in a flurry of motion and sets about incapacitating Chara's men, two chops to the back of the neck, right above the spine, and then the horse tranquilizer he'd gotten from his lockbox.

His suit's beyond saving by the end, but it's worth it for the look on PK's face. "Carey," he says, eyes wide, bouncing back and forth from Carey to the slumped-over figures on the floor. It's not even a surprise that PK knows his name. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"I—" Carey swallows, jaw clenching. He knows how this must look: his hair wild, eyes bloodshot from being awake for the past four-odd days, _the horse tranquilizer_. Now that the immediate danger is over, a dull chill climbs over his shoulders to replace the adrenaline. He drops into an armchair, legs folding beneath him in relief, and tries to concentrate. _Pleky told me you were in trouble, so I went on an international wild goose chase to find you_ seems too honest. So does _I'm really glad you aren't dead._ "Chara," he says, finally, exhaling. "I heard about the hit."

PK slides his hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels. "I already knew, but thank you. I had it under control. Well, except that last part, I guess." He sends Carey an unreadable expression. "You have a killer right hook."

Carey shakes his head. "You know Chara will just send more men."

PK looks incredibly pleased with himself, which isn't right. "He won't be bothering us anymore."

"You can't know that."

"I told you, didn't I?" PK says. "If you can figure someone out, you can get in his head and make him believe anything."

"You're saying you found something to love about Zdeno Chara," Carey says, flat.

"I'm saying," PK returns, "Chara doesn't even know who we are anymore. People believe what they want to believe, and Chara is the kind of person who wants to believe his mind is an impenetrable fortress. I joined him on a flight from Sydney to Johannesburg and gave him a way out. Inception is tricky, but this time it worked." He beams. "He didn't even know he hired those guys." A philosophical note enters his voice. "No wonder the short one looked like he was about to charge me. Probably mad about missing a paycheck."

"Oh," Carey says. He feels very tired, and very sore, and a little stupid. "But that file they had on you—"

"Information disseminated on purpose." Carey blinks. "Bait," PK clarifies.

"You had it under control."

PK steps toward him, face unreadable again. "You followed me."

"I was worried," Carey's mouth says, without his permission. "You should tell me these things."

"I didn't want them to come after you next," PK explains. "I like you in one piece."

"Yes, well, me too. Just—with you. Fuck." Carey clamps his mouth shut after that.

PK's eyebrows rise so far they threaten to disappear into his hairline. He slides forward the rest of the way, hands settling over the armrests of Carey's chair, so close Carey can smell his spicy aftershave, see the puffy skin beneath his eyes. After a moment's consideration, his face drops. PK's lips are chapped and dry, but his mouth is warm. Carey's eyes close, the tense knot in the center of his chest loosening a little. He takes PK's face in his hands, blunt fingernails scratching at the close crop of his beard. Breathes out of his nose, relaxing.

Carey's almost settled into the lull when PK pulls back from him, reluctant. "Sorry, give me a second. There's something I forgot." Carey watches him slide his phone out of his suit jacket and dial a number. "Gally. It's done. I took care of it. Get your ass out of hiding."

Carey sends him a thin smile after he hangs up. "Hiding? Gally?"

"I told him to lay low while I took care of things," PK says. "He wasn't happy about it, but I think he didn't want to mess things up even more." His gaze wanders down to Carey's mouth again. "Anyway. Where were we?"

Carey clenches a fist in the rumpled collar of PK's dress shirt. "You don't want to talk about it?"

"I know you're a man of action," PK says, and smiles into the next kiss.

 

 

They leave Chara's guys trussed up in the Fairmont. It turns out PK has an apartment in Vancouver, two bedrooms and one bathroom and a living and dining area with an open floor plan, sun shining in through the blinds. Carey's bone tired, drunk with exhaustion, but he still takes the time to survey the old, lumpy furniture and the family photos on the walls, the huge beanbag in the corner by the lamp, shelves crammed full of books. A half-painted canvas next to the windows, oils long dried on the palette. "It's very you," Carey rasps at the door to PK's room. There's dirty laundry everywhere, but the sheets are clean. Crisp, dark navy blue. PK lets Carey pull him down.

 

 

Carey doesn't dream. His phone, when he wakes up in his ruined suit, is at 2%, says he's slept twenty hours straight. He can feel it in the tenderness of his head, his gummy lashes, the dry mouth. To his right, PK's snoring quietly. Carey shoots a _we aren't dead_ mass text to Pleky, Prusty, and Therrien, and then rolls out of the covers to shower. PK has an entire counter full of skincare products. Carey's toes sink into the thick rug outside the tub. He drops his clothes on the floor, kicks them against the wall. He doesn't think PK will mind.

"Hi," PK yawns, sitting up when Carey exits the bathroom and comes back to bed in a fluffy bathrobe.

"Hi," Carey says, and climbs back in next to him. PK still smells like airport and has horrible morning breath but Carey kisses him anyway, drawn to him like a magnet. Like he's trying to convey four years of unspoken words through his mouth, funnel everything into PK like it'll make him feel any less.

PK must get it, because he laughs, kicks his feet out, hooks his arms around Carey's neck and pulls him in.

 

 

"So," Carey says, much later, voice muffled by the pillow beneath PK's head. He pauses meaningfully. "Pernell Karl."

PK groans. "Yeah, about that."

"I believe you owe me a million bucks."

PK snorts, loud, inelegant. He tangles his legs in Carey's and flips them over, the solid line of his body pressing Carey into the mattress. "I'm sure I'll find a way to pay it through."


End file.
